Reminders of pitfalls I've avoided sometimes arise unexpectedly. I recently left a Chicago hotel to the roar of jet engines reverberating in the canyons between the high-rises. I was in my car headed for the Eisenhower expressway just west of the Loop when the roar returned with such force that something in the dashboard rattled. I craned my neck until I found its source: four sleek, dark blue F/A-18 Hornets, their wingtips almost touching, flew over the north Loop at about 1500 feet and disappeared behind the maze of tall buildings. A few minutes later two of the planes reappeared, one following the other, at what appeared to be an altitude possibly below that of the Sears Tower observation deck a quarter-mile south their flight path. The planes snaked their way almost between the tallest of the skyscrapers and flew back out over the lake.
Ah-ha, I thought. The Chicago Air and Water Show was coming in two days, and the Blue Angels aerobatic team, an annual favorite of the show, was practicing.
Wow. Those amazing technological marvels have always excited me, just like they do millions of other Americans. My excitement at seeing them waned quickly, however.
I remembered the time, over twenty years ago when the massive delivery of new F/A-18's that the Reagan Administration had ordered was nearing, I had traveled to Glenview Naval Air Station to take a test. You see, I had the bug to fly one of those sleek machines of incredible power. At that time, if you wanted to talk to the Navy about playing with their toys, you first had to take a written test kind of like an SAT except it had an extra section filled with diagrams of the horizon seen out of the windscreen and multiple choices of what attitude the plane was in.
I took the test and apparently did quite well on it. As you probably know, test taking is a skill in its own right. Some are particularly gifted, and I appear to be one of them. It seemed I had passed the initial hurdle.
Here is where good judgment saved me from that aforementioned pitfall.
At the time I was married with a baby on the way. Upon reflection the descriptions of training and deployment conjured scenes of emotional horror in my imagination. Gone for months or even a year at a time I would return from sea a complete stranger to my child. Getting reacquainted with a wife who had grown accustomed to my absence, and who, out of necessity was fully capable of living without me, was disturbing. I guess I was quite naïve about my dreams of naval aviation because this wasn't what I had in mind.
Under the circumstances my response had to be, "Thanks, but no thanks."
I ended up in a much less exotic occupation, to say the least.
Years have passed and over that time my views of those sleek planes and the (mostly) guys that fly them have shifted. I now see something I didn't see before. It isn't about aerobatics or shiny blue paint, or traveling a thousand miles per hour or zooming in a vertical climb to the edge of space.
Those planes are simply killing machines, and the folks that fly them, no matter how skilled, dedicated, or bright, are puppets.
Like the carriers on which they ride, F/A-18's are tools for delivering bombs and other ordnance onto places where other people live or work. If those people are working to attack Americans minding their own business at home, the pilots' work would be honorable, but you don't need to transport such complex weaponry halfway around the world to attack aggressors. After all, aggressors need some proximity to be a threat.
The other problem with being an operator of one of those sleek jets is that one is not an owner. Someone else tells you where to go and who to bomb, and the agreement you entered into says that you don't get to say no, not if you want to go on playing with the toys. I think "puppet" is fairly apt.
So pilots have little option but to rationalize what they do as "good," and their military and civilian superiors who tell them who to kill as, "wise and well-informed." While we know this last is empirically false, humans have a tremendous capacity to lie to themselves when that's the only bridge required to get them to what they want. In this case, pilots get to play with toys that are at the very top of the grownup-toy food chain. Like politicians and bureaucrats who love the power they wield, rationalizing any evil is a natural part of the human condition.
The Blue Angels perform thrilling feats of synchronized flight at airshows, but those games are basically just a circus to keep us enthralled. The purpose of those aircraft is to drop death from the air, no more and no less, and this power resides in the hands of people whose own interests create a murderous conflict of interest.
The pitfall I avoided wasn't just the alienation from my family that sea duty would entail. I also avoided becoming one of these rationalizers. I'm no better a person than any of them, and I'm sure I would have made a pact with the devil himself if that was all that stood between me and strapping one of those planes on my back and hitting the afterburners. It's an experience that on a practical level can't be bought.
I would have become a different person. Given that I really like who I am today and am proud of my insights that parallel those of the many LRC columnists who I so admire, to become that Navy pilot would have been a great loss to me in some metaphysical sense. I would have remained, probably forever, among the ranks of the blind.
Of course, like any good story there's a tiny bit of irony. I didn't discover until decades later that the Naval officer at NAS Glenview was, shall we say, less than truthful. If you go to Pensacola and observe some of the men training to fly high performance jets like the Hornet, a consistent theme is evident. They are all about eight inches shorter than I am (I'm a bit over 6’2"). It seems that being tall is a certain disqualifier for flying those jets because space is a premium when such a machine is designed. But they're always looking for a few good men to fly the far less glamorous fixed-wings and helicopters…
I take away two morals from this. First, the folks that staff the state's apparatus always over-promise and under-deliver. If you see everything they offer through that lens, you'll never be disappointed. Second, great care must be exercised when pursuing something of great interest, lest one's principles end up in the landfill.
August 23, 2004
David Calderwood [send him mail] a businessman, artist, and author of the novel Revolutionary Language, selected January 2000 Freedom Book of the Month at Free-market.net.
